The Tolling of the Bell Means Change
by Nadia Snow
Summary: While Sam and Dean Winchester are searching for their father, they meet a young waitress who claims to be a fellow hunter. She seems perfectly normal; plucky and smart, but normal. So why can't Dean find the words to tell her no when she asks to join them to work a few jobs? /Contains Chapters for Season 1/T for violence and a safety net/Cover is meant to look like a promo poster/


_AN: Hello, welcome to my supernatural fic, take 2. This is one I keep coming back to because I love writing it so much but considering I started it almost three years ago the writing in the original chapters is... depressing at best. So here is this! Bringing back AJ with a much better handle on her character. My general formula is this: I'll be doing anywhere between 7 and 10 episodes per season, with ideally two chapters per episode. It'll be about half an half episodes that are in the actual show and "episodes" that are of my own creation. This chapter is of the latter variety. Anywho, have fun, and please enjoy. Thanks for reading!_

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AJ McAllister sat silently behind the bar of a small town dead end diner, aptly named " _First & Last Chance"_ The place had been in her family for as long as she could remember, though when her parents ran it there were a lot more customers. Today, she was the only one working- the cook had gone home because "it was Sunday after all", and the post church brunch "rush" had passed. "The chances of anyone coming in are second to none." He had told her. And he "wanted to get home to his girlfriend." And so she sat, reading last week's newspaper and chewing on a pen. Her brow was furrowed, and this particular Sunday it wasn't over the crossword, but a troubling front page headline.

 _3 Dead in Freak Car Accident_

It wasn't so much the accident that bothered her, but the details. She had underlined bits of the article, and was grabbing a pad of paper to start writing in when the bell on the door chimed, snapping her out of her thoughts. Her wide blue eyes rested on two young men, both of them attractive. Out the window she could see the sleek black car they had arrived in. She stared at it for a moment, taking in each angle and curve. Just because she didn't know anything about cars didn't mean that she couldn't admire them, right?

"Beautiful, ain't she?" The shorter man asked her with a wink. Her eyes met his and she smiled.

"Sure is."

"I could take you for a ride, if you wanted."

"I'm on shift." AJ shrugged, jokingly apologetic. "Take a seat wherever you want, I'll grab some menus and waters and be right with you."

She heard the sound of muffled bickering as she knelt down to grab the menus from under the bar and she chuckled. She was pretty sure she heard something about "please don't bang the waitress" as she disappeared into the kitchen to grab water glasses and a pitcher, a moment of complete silence and then,

"What's your name, sweetheart?"

"AJ." She held back a laugh as she approached their table. "And you?"

"I'm Dean, this is Sam."

"Sam and Dean, nice." She smiled at the two of them as she handed them menus and filled their waters, noting that Sam hadn't said a word to her since they came in. "What brings you two to town?"

"We're here about the car accident," Dean explained, "From the department of public safety."

"Oh, well then it's good to have you here. I was just reading about that accident actually, weird, wasn't it?"

"How so?" Sam looked up at her for the first time, finally giving her his attention.

"I mean, the state the car was in, the missing passengers..." She tilted her head slightly to the side. "But you'd know all about that."

"Of course we would." Dean's head shook slightly before he smiled at her. "We just like getting information from as many sources as we can."

"Right."

"So, uh, why don't you grab a seat, tell us about what happened?" Dean offered.

"Okay." She raised an eyebrow as she drug over a chair. AJ was never one to turn down conversation, but this was a little weird. "But I only know what was in the newspaper."

"Well, we're more looking for specifics about the area." Sam turned to her. "Is that stretch of road particularly dangerous? I mean, has anything happened along there before?"

"Not really." She looked to Dean as she spoke, knowing it was a flat out lie. "It's no worse than any other stretch of road in this town."

It wasn't that she didn't want to help them, she just knew that two police officers wouldn't be able to handle whatever drove that car off the road. She would have to keep them from picking up any trails until she could get someone to partner up with her for a case.

"Right…" Dean leaned forward ever so slightly and looked her in the eye. "Listen, AJ, we just wanna know anything… weird that may have happened on that road."

"Are you guys..?" AJ leaned back, raising an eyebrow. "Can I see some ID?"

Dean frowned and sat up, pulling a small leather bound ID out of his pocket and handing it to her. She looked at it carefully, examining every detail for anything off. She twisted the pendant on her necklace as she found herself deep in thought. The ID checked out, it was damn near perfect, but she knew that the state had sent people to investigate already, and they were asking the wrong kind of question to be cops.

"Everything okay?" Dean asked.

"Are you guys hunters?" AJ blurted out, hoping she'd be able to cover if she was wrong.

There was a long, awkward pause. AJ could tell by their shared look that Sam and Dean were either deciding on how much to tell her, or how crazy she was.

"Like, game hunters, or..?" Sam trailed off.

"Or…." AJ replied, wondering why hunters didn't have some sort of signal to let each other know who they were.

Or maybe they did, she wouldn't know.

"Are you…? I mean, are **you**?" Dean asked.

"My family all hunt." AJ was grasping for straws, trying to keep things vague enough not to horrify them if they were civilians, but specific enough to tip them off if they were, in fact, hunters. "Mostly, uh, big game and the, uh, weird stuff."

The three sat in complete silence for a moment, looking between each other in a standoff. Sam and Dean shared another look before Dean finally cleared his throat.

"Yeah, we're hunters."

"Oh." Even though her suspicions had been confirmed, AJ was still surprised. She thought she knew all the hunters in the area, they must have been from way out of state. "Where are you guys from?"

"We travel."

That made sense.

"Alright, well then I've already started digging." AJ scooted out of her chair and made her way back to the bar, talking over her shoulder as she grabbed her newspaper and returned to the table. "And that stretch of road seems pretty harmless on it's own. It's a complete straightaway, speed limit is fairly slow, there's no reason it should be any more dangerous than any other road, but…"

"But what?" Sam prompted her as she trailed off.

"I'm only gonna tell you if you take me with you on the hunt." She blurted out. "I know what I'm doing, I'll be able to help. Besides this is my town so I want to be there."

"Yeah, no. Not happening." Dean scoffed.

"I know how to hunt." AJ insisted. "And besides, if I'm right about this thing you're going to need my help."

"Why?" Sam asked.

"Because I think I know where to find it, and you're not going to make it on your own. I know the area, I know what we're looking for. Bringing me along is smart."

"Look the answer is no-"

"Dean." Sam cut him off. "She's right, we don't know the area, we have no leads, if she knows anything we could use the help on this one."

AJ looked to Dean hopefully and tried to keep from chewing her lip. She could tell he was mulling it over, but he didn't seem to excited about the idea.

"Fine." He said after a moment. "But I don't gotta like it."

"Great!" AJ lit up at his words, surprising both of the boys. "So, anyway, Mark, the driver, is checked in at a hospital a couple of towns over, but I don't think we actually need to talk to him. This follows the same MO as other accidents and disappearances in the area that have been happening every five years, the first I found is fifteen years ago."

"Okay, so what are we looking at?" Sam asked.

"Well all signs point to some kind of spirit. There are a few firsthand accounts of a young girl appearing in the middle of the road. Driver swerves out of the way to avoid her, ends up wrapped around a tree, and then she's gone." She paused and looked between the boys, swallowing uncomfortably. "Here's where it gets really rough; it's a family in every crash. The number of kids doesn't matter, but there's always at least one child in the car, and they always go missing without a trace. There have been three car crashes that fit the pattern over the last fifteen years including this one, always on the same date."

"How many missing kids?" Dean frowned at her.

"So far, six. Two in the first, one in the second, and three the other week."

"So it's only been, what, a week and a half since the kids went missing. Maybe we find 'em."

"I can close up here and get changed in twenty minutes if you guys want to check out the crash site?" AJ offered. "Not like there's anybody around to complain if I ditch."

"Sounds good." Dean nodded at her. "We'll be out by the car prepping some stuff."

AJ nodded and stood up to go change, but Sam stopped her as Dean made his way through the doors to the car.

"What did you mean when you said you knew where to find it?" He asked, giving her a look. "Is there anything else you need to tell us?"

AJ stared up at him, surprised. She felt astoundingly small now that she was actually standing next to him; he had to tower at least a foot over her, and his eyes were both intense and disinterested as he looked at her which made her feel even smaller. She stood rigidly for a moment, sizing him up. What should she tell him? She could lie, but he seemed to see right through her.

"I don't know where… exactly to find it." She said slowly, pursing her lips together. "But I've been there before, I think I'll be able to find the remains."

"When were you there?" Sam wasn't backing down.

"Almost four years ago. I was drunk. I was on my way home from a party and I saw her in the woods so I followed." She looked at him defiantly. "I was so hungover the next morning I figured I had imagined it, but the pattern is there and the accounts match. I know I'm right."

The two stood in silence for a moment, staring each other down before Sam finally conceded, nodding at her and letting go of her arm.

"We'll be by the car." He reminded her as he exited through the glass doors.

AJ stared after him for a moment, trying to figure him out. He seemed completely unattached from everything around him, but AJ new a front when she saw one. She tugged at the hem of her dress as she thought, frowning deeply. There was something there...

But for now, she had a job to do.

AJ changed quickly into a green t shirt and jeans, threw on a her jacket, and put on her running shoes. She grabbed her purse from the break room and then locked up the diner and met the boys outside.

"You ready?" She asked as she approached them.

"Yeah, you?" Dean cocked an eyebrow at her.

"You bet. It's only two or three miles down the road. You two want to walk or drive?"

"We're driving." Dean scoffed. "Get in. And no shoes on the seats."

The drive took them only a few minutes, but they were long, silent, and awkward. AJ wasn't sure how much, if any, Sam had told Dean about their conversation and usually she wouldn't care, but she wasn't sure if Dean would change his mind about letting her help if she didn't know the exact location of the remains. She spent the drive thinking about it, trying to remember as much of the night as she possibly could. She had a vague idea, there was a ravine about half a mile off the road that she remembered falling into and wandering through for close to an hour. If she could just make it to that ravine she might be able to find what was left of the body from there.

 _"It wont be that easy,"_ She reminded herself, silently. _"Remember what happened last time."_

Her heart dropped a little as she sorted through the memories. A dark night, a frozen presence, stumbling through the woods. It was Halloween and her stupid fluffy skirt kept getting caught on branches, she had lost her feathered tricorne hat at least 20 minutes earlier, and her fake saber was doing her absolutely no good against the foliage. Her vision was fuzzy, she was drunk and crying, her boyfriend, soon to be ex boyfriend, had been sleeping with another girl. She caught them at the party and quickly left, taking the shortcut through the woods to avoid him on her way home. A person kept flitting in and out of her vision, so she followed her, thinking maybe she would be lead out of the woods, until she reached a steep drop off.

She had called out into the woods after the figure, or maybe even Andrew, cheating bastard that he was, and got no answer. It got colder by the minute until she heard a quiet laugh and was forcefully shoved over the edge, tumbling down into the ravine and landing with a sickening crunch in a pile of bones.

She had thought it was a nightmare. All those bones... three dead children, just left there to rot.

"This is the crash site." She blurted out suddenly. "See, that's the tree."

A large tree on the side of the road had been splintered and broken, there were tread marks on the road and in the dirt. Dean pulled the car to a stop and they all three piled out and examined the area.

"Alright AJ, you said you know what's up." Dean prompted. "If we're looking at a spirit, where do we find the remains so we can torch 'em."

"There in the woods. We've got a bit of a hike ahead of us."

"Lovely. Well, we've got a few hours of daylight left, I say we go for it, maybe we can find 'em by nightfall."

"Sounds good to me." AJ watched as the boys pulled weapons and bags out of the trunk of the car. "You guys are bringing guns?" She questioned, raising and eyebrow.

"Rock salt rounds," Dean explained. "Good for hitting spooks."

"You got anything for a 9mm in there?" AJ asked curiously. "I can grab my gun out of the car if you think it'll help."

Sam and Dean turned to look at her like she sprouted a third head.

"You're carrying?" Dean stared at her. "I feel like that's something you gotta tell people."

"I mean, of course I am." AJ raised an eyebrow. "Come on, I come from a family of hunters, you can't really expect that I'm _not_ armed at any given moment."

Dean shook his head, exhaled loudly and dug around the trunk.

"Grab it then, I'll get you some bullets."

When the guns were loaded and everyone felt prepared, AJ led the other hunters into the woods. She moved with caution, remembering the apparitions she had seen four years ago. The air was thick, and seemed heavier than normal making it hard to breathe. AJ's stomach started turning in knots the closer they got to the ravine, and Sam and Dean weren't helping, they walked almost silently and set the hair on the back of her neck on edge.

 _"Just breathe."_ She told herself. _"You'll be okay. It's just a spirit, you've done this before."_

A quiet _clink, clank_ made her heart skip a beat. She looked down to the pendant around her neck to see the tiny strip of silver spinning furiously in it's cage. AJ looked frantically around, trying to pinpoint the presence. The leaves were thick and shuddering and it was getting dark, she couldn't see a thing. There was no way to tell if there were any cold spots since the entire area was freezing cold.

"Guys, there's something here."

"What? How do you know?" Dean's voice was muted, it seemed far away.

"Just trust me, okay?" AJ was getting more panicked, something was wrong. "I just know."

She twisted her head this way and that, trying to see anything at all through the forest. What was that saying? Can't see the forest for the trees? Can't see the trees for the forest? Her heart was pounding. She couldn't see anything for the anything. A shiver lurched violently down her spine. It had been cold, but when did it get this cold? She looked over her shoulder and stopped dead in her tracks.

A young girl stared up at her. Her right leg was mangled and dragging, her face coated in blood, and her sunken eyes glistened, reflecting light that wasn't there. She was peaking out from behind Dean's leg, and she gave AJ a large, eerie smile.


End file.
